Andornot Blog

(Woburn, MA - August 15th, 2006) Elizabeth "Betty" Bole Eddison, one of Inmagic's founders and a recognized leader in the library world, died recently after a period of declining health.

Inmagic was built upon her vision of the future of information technology. At her previous company, Warner-Eddison Associates, Betty pioneered the application of library science principles to business information problems. Her greatest passion was to raise awareness in the corporate world of the value of the unstructured information lying around in the organization, and the benefit of using trained information professionals to manage this information. She promoted her vision tirelessly through speaking engagements, published articles, and leadership positions in professional organizations such as the Special Libraries Association, as well as through her company's consulting and services business.

Inmagic, Inc. was a natural successor, building software to support the same vision. Betty, who was Inmagic's Chairman for almost 15 years, remained active in the company and in the information industry until her retirement in 2001.

Betty co-founded Inmagic with Karen Brothers. Karen notes "Betty was a high-energy, strong-principled lady whose vocabulary did not include the word 'can't'. She made a major, positive difference in the lives of many of the people she met."

Hope N. Tillman, Director of Libraries, Babson College, and a past president of the Special Libraries Association (2001-2002) recalls that "Betty was forward-looking and cared deeply about the future of the profession and the education of librarians. She was an early entrepreneur in the information industry, first with Warner-Eddison Associates and later Inmagic, and served as a role model for many SLA members. I miss her personally and professionally."

A memorial service will be held on September 9 in Lexington, Massachusetts.For additional background on Betty, along with information on how to donate in Betty's name and sign Betty's online guest book:http://www.inmagic.com/news/press_room.html

Andornot's RSS Control for WebPublisher embodies a way to create feeds from any WebPublisher database, not just your own. Any public WebPublisher database, that is, which means any WebPublisher database you can reach with an internet URL. Case in point and primary victim, I mean, demonstration example, is the Inmagic Knowledgebase. The internet has taught me to be lazy, and this means I expect to get all the information I require in exactly the manner I choose. For me, the morning would not work* without opening my favourite feed reader in order to review all the feeds and blogs I've subscribed to, which tell me all the latest news in my chosen field. If I am not informed I can hardly justify calling myself an expert. Yet there is no ready-made feed of the Inmagic Knowledgebase at the time of this writing, so that (horrors) I have to actually go there and search it, which is all so 20th century. So I made one myself: http://feeds.feedburner.com/InmagicKnowledgebase (permanent URL) Subscribe to that URL from a feed reader or aggregator. The feed requests all articles added in the last 60 days. *Indeed, the sun would crumple like a wheezy balloon and all would be blood, frogs, blackness, and plague. This is to be avoided.

I just spent 20 minutes letting head bonk sharply and repeatedly on desk over Inmagic ODBC's "unable to open table" error, because I FORGOT that the ASP.NET worker account on Windows XP is aspnet, not network service, like it is with Windows Server 2003. I kept upping the permissions on network service to no avail. It was like I'd strapped bananas to my feet instead of shoes for the Summer Fun 10K of Broken Glass Run, and then, when things went badly, tied on bigger and bigger bananas.